Are we in 2011 or 2001?

Lately have been hearing lot of people talking about valuation bubble, especially in the valley and how its going to effect or already effecting Indian consumer internet companies. More so, some are also speculating that recent money being pumped by many VC’s in internet e-commerce businesses is just another butterfly effect of what’s happening in US.

But that’s another story for yet another day. For now, let’s concentrate on the primary speculation i.e. are we or are we not riding high on yet another bubble of valuation (P/E ratio) like we did about a decade back?

Even though we really can’t come to the conclusion till we live through such times but what we can do right now is play with some numbers and possibly figure out if really we are in 2011 or yet another glorified 2001.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Groupon’s revenue in 2010 rose more than 22 times to $760 million in its second full year since its daily deals site launched, up from $33 million in 2009. Zynga, the maker of online social games like FarmVille, scored revenue of $850 million in its third full year in 2010, more than triple the year before, and Facebook’s revenue rocketed to as high as $2 billion in 2010, its sixth full year.

Thanks to marquee very-late stage investors like DST whose late stage investment catapulted valuation of Facebook, Zynga, Groupon’s valuation to dizzying heights. But we can’t take away the point that all these companies are already making handsome amount of not only revenues but also on their way to profitability.

Also another point to note is all the above mentioned companies are creating marketing so they would definitely leads the pack since they are frontliners.